Welcome back! This spring 2013 edition of Informer will bring you a range of fairly different articles, perhaps just the right mix for this time of the year. More about the articles later, let us first have a glimpse at what has been going on in the IR community. SIGIR 2013 is taking shape. Following the… Continue reading Editorial
Category: Spring 2013
Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor
Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world—both physical… Continue reading Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor
Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2013)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested… Continue reading Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2013)
Interaction Models for Faceted Search
Introduction Faceted search offers tremendous potential for transforming the search experience. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery scenarios. But there is one design aspect of faceted search that is particuarly hard to get right:… Continue reading Interaction Models for Faceted Search
Search: Emergent and Extrinsic Semantics
Semantics is a term often used in the search technology and information retrieval community these days. A distinction is drawn between semantic and traditional search, implying that somehow semantic search is a more advanced or sophisticated form. My claim in this article is that there are actually two forms of semantic search: emergent and extrinsic.… Continue reading Search: Emergent and Extrinsic Semantics
Hybrid Parallel Classifiers for Managing Big Data with Hierarchies
“Big Data” is one of the latest buzzwords in the IT industry nowadays. Companies are building up huge stores of data running into terabytes and more. Data hierarchies are getting bigger and bigger and more complex. At the same time, search/categorization speeds are also expected to increase. Single classifiers are now unable to deal with… Continue reading Hybrid Parallel Classifiers for Managing Big Data with Hierarchies
Information Retrieval Group, University of Duisburg-Essen
(This article was co-authored with Sascha Kriewel, University of Duisburg-Essen.) The Information Retrieval group at the University of Duisburg-Essen is part of the Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science Department in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen. The department provides degree programmes in Applied Computer Science as well as in Applied… Continue reading Information Retrieval Group, University of Duisburg-Essen
Applied research at the Competence Center Information Retrieval and Machine Learning of DAI Laboratory, TU Berlin
The Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) Laboratory at Technische Universität Berlin, headed by Prof. Dr. Sahin Albayrak, works on providing solutions for a new generation of systems and services to support our everyday life, coined as “smart services and smart systems”. The institute currently employs over 100 researchers, post-docs, graduate students, and support staff. The main… Continue reading Applied research at the Competence Center Information Retrieval and Machine Learning of DAI Laboratory, TU Berlin
Made in Germany – Information Retrieval Research in Regensburg
These are heady times for the German IR community. Norbert Fuhr’s recent winning of the Salton Prize not only rewarded a fantastic and long-term individual contribution to the field, but has also served to shed light on the whole IR scene in Germany – a fact underlined by this “Made in Germany” series. There are… Continue reading Made in Germany – Information Retrieval Research in Regensburg
Events Spring 2013
Forthcoming Events Edited By Andy MacFarlane Conferences/Workshops WIMS’13: International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics. Of interest to members working in the area web search, information extract etc. Madrid, Spain, 12-14 June 2013. http://aida.ii.uam.es/wims13/ NAACL-HLT 2013: 14th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Of interest to members… Continue reading Events Spring 2013